German Soldiers in the Great War: Letters and Eyewitness Accounts

Introduction

Benjamin Ziemann

In early 1917, the artist Fritz Erler created one of the most iconic representations of German front-line soldiers during the First World War. His poster, published to advertise the sixth war loan, does not gloss over the hardship of battle. It shows a soldier leaning against a wire entanglement, in field-grey uniform and full combat gear, including two potato-masher grenades and a gas mask. His face under the steel helmet (which the German army had only introduced in 1916) is black from soot. His eyes, exhausted but determined, are gazing into the distance, to the enemies on the other side of no-man’s-land.¹ This image not only gathers crucial elements of what was to become the classic iconography of the German soldier of the Great War, barbed wire, steel helmet and gas mask. It also vividly represents the determination that allegedly characterized German soldiers during the Great War, their eagerness to overcome obstacles and to hold out by any means. This is the iconography of the ‘New Man’ who was born in the trenches of Flanders and Northern France during the battles of materiel after 1916, with their systematic and intensive artillery fire and the use of shock-troops who were specially trained to overcome the stalemate of trench warfare. As a powerful set of symbols and connotations, it captured the imagination of right-wing artists and allowed them to promote their militaristic ideas. During the interwar period, Ernst Jünger and other prominent authors who promoted an aggressive ‘soldierly nationalism’ translated this iconography into literary texts.²

The primary sources printed in this volume offer, in contrast, a wider ranging set of perceptions and observations from the men who served in the German army from August 1914 to November 1918. While some of these voices and opinions were not raised and discussed in public during and after the war, others were in fact already present in the heated debates about the legacy of the war experience that divided German society after the armistice. For an understanding of this collection of documents, a brief tour d’horizon through the conflicting interpretations of the front-line experience since 1918 is thus necessary (I). Secondly, some basic institutional characteristics of the German army before and during the war are outlined, as they provide the context for many of the observations and grievances that are reflected in the sources (II). The final section of this introduction explains the range and provenance of the materials we have included in our collection and the principles that have informed our selection (III).

I. Interpretations of the Front-line Experience

Germany during the 1920s was in many respects a postwar society. The social and economic consequences of the war, such as the need to pay pensions and benefits to an estimated 2.7 million disabled war veterans and to the many war widows and orphans, exerted tremendous pressure on the public finances and triggered a wave of political mobilization. Among the war victims there was growing resentment against the bureaucratic nature of the welfare-state provision and against pension cuts.³ Another crucial aspect of the ‘internal denial of peace’ was of course the widespread rejection of the terms of the Versailles treaty and hence the inability of many Germans to come to terms with the fact that Germany had been defeated.⁴ The infamous ‘stab in the back’ legend, or Dolchstoß-myth, invented immediately after the armistice and propagated by right-wing circles in an attempt to blame Jews and Socialists for the collapse of the army, is another case in point. It was the most blatant but not the only example of the coordinated efforts by the nationalist camp in Weimar to undermine the Republic with their interpretation of the legacy of the Great War.⁵

Since 1918/19, the battle experiences of front-line soldiers provided another crucial arena for the Weimar debate on the consequences of the First World War. Subsequently, the immediate experiences of soldiers at the front were transformed into memories and public remembrances which gave meaning to the ongoing symbolic presence of death and destruction and the absence of those who had been killed. In a complex cultural development that relied on a variety of communications media and public rituals, the Kriegserlebnis (war experience) of soldiers at the front fed into and gave way to symbolic representations of the front generation. This was, of course, a highly selective process, as there are no clearly delineated or even authoritative memories. Already during the war and immediately after battles, the surviving soldiers as eyewitness had started to doctor their short-term recollections. The novelist Carl Zuckmayer, a war volunteer of 1914 who later served as a lieutenant on the Western Front, described this tendency in his autobiography:

In those days, in the short periods of rest which followed the most terrible weeks of the battle at the Somme, I learned how quickly man is able to forget. Among the troops who had just left, the mood was like one would find in a veteran’s association, although they would lie in the same mud the day after tomorrow. They had already forgotten that it was in fact mud. It was a dreadful thing. Mate, what have we gone through! Not a single word that they used to discuss or narrate what they had experienced was correct.⁶

This transformation of the reality of the war experience into selective recollections and affirmative narratives not only continued, but intensified after the armistice. In effect, it led to a syndrome of public representations and symbols that the historian George L. Mosse has called the ‘Myth of the War Experience, which looked back upon the war as a meaningful and even sacred event’. This myth ‘was designed to mask war and to legitimize the war experience’.⁷ While such mythological representations of the front-line experiences emerged in all belligerent nations, they were certainly most ‘urgently needed’ and most widely appreciated ‘in the defeated nations’.⁸ It is, however, incorrect to assume, as Mosse does, that the nationalist memories of the war experience ‘informed most postwar politics’ in Germany, ‘which proved most hospitable to the myth’.⁹ Although it is correct that heroic and affirmative representations of the front-line experience were hegemonic in the early 1930s, towards the end of the Weimar Republic they had successfully permeated the German public only by way of a contested and protracted process. In the immediate postwar years, it was anything but a foregone conclusion that it would be possible to cover up the large number of grievances that had been voiced by the troops. Since 1916, these grievances had substantially undermined the morale of the troops and had prepared them for their widespread support of the revolutionary events in November 1918.

Amidst this wave of discontent with the injustice in the army, which spilled over in postwar critiques of the vanished Imperial state and also affected the national camp, we have, for instance, to consider a book on the ‘Causes of the Collapse’, published in 1919.¹⁰ The author, Walther Lambach, was a leading official in the German National Union of Commercial Employees (Deutschnationaler Handlungsgehilfen-Verband, DHV), whose 123,000 members (according to the figure for 1913) had been staunch supporters of the monarchical system and followed a right-wing agenda.¹¹ Lambach’s book presented a cross-section of the many war letters he had received from DHV members serving in the field army. The prevalent tone was highly critical of the Jews – following the anti-Semitic ideology of the DHV, but also of the junior officers, who were keen to exploit the system for their personal advantage but not at all interested in the welfare of their subordinates. Other points that attracted the ire of the white-collar employees were: the lack of a comradeship that transcended differences in class and status, a fact that undermined their hopes for national unity held in August 1914; and the hypocrisy of the Patriotic Instruction Programme (Vaterländischer Unterricht) that was rolled out in the summer of 1917 across the army in order to boost morale. But the reports filed in the context of this programme simply glossed over the prevalent mood and did not address any of the numerous grievances.¹² The gist of this critique of the national war effort from a nationalist perspective was summed up in the following letter from the Western Front in May 1917:

I went to the front on the third day of mobilization as a member of the Landsturm, full with ideals, true to my affiliation with the German National Association. But what I have experienced in the course of time from our officers has already killed my idealism. I could tell you incidents which would amaze you. The war is only considered as a profitable business, from which everyone is trying to earn as much as possible.¹³

When Lambach published these and many other eyewitness accounts from the members of his association in 1919, he wanted to demonstrate that the DHV had tried to end the grievances and boost the morale of the troops by including these materials in petitions filed to the Prussian War Ministry. Another reason, however, was to be found in the wave of post-revolutionary critiques of the Imperial system, which also targeted the corruption and injustice in the field army. Lambach clearly hoped for a restoration of ‘order and for a new German advancement’. But in 1919, far from being able to propagate a ‘myth’ of the war experience, he had to respond to the prospect that leftist currents could use the grievances ‘to attract customers, in order to talk them into accepting also their other dubious products (anti-militarism, cosmopolitanism)’.¹⁴ And Lambach was quite right to worry about the negative consequences of wartime testimony in any attempt to reaffirm a nationalist interpretation of the front-line experiences in the early years of the Republic. From 1919 to 1921, many pro-republican authors, pacifists and socialists published booklets and brochures that were meant to serve as an indictment against the corruption of the Wilhelmine army and the cruelty of war. During those years, the worm’s eye perspective was predominantly used not to glorify, but to condemn the bitter reality of trench warfare.¹⁵

Competing interpretations of the front-line experience continued to make claims in public debate during the 1920s, and evidence given by ordinary soldiers, and war letters in particular, remained a crucial point for contention in these debates. Another important arena for the controversy about these issues had opened up in the autumn of 1919, when the fact-finding committee of the Reichstag, which dealt with a whole raft of judicial and political issues emanating from the Great War, including German offences against international law, established a subcommittee. This particular one, the fourth subcommittee, had to deal with the political and military reasons for the collapse of the German military in 1918. Like other subcommittees, its composition reflected the majority enjoyed by the liberal and conservative parties in the Reichstag. These currents used the committee as a forum to reiterate the legend, now based on an allegedly ‘objective’ historical record, that the army had been ‘stabbed in the back’ by socialist revolutionaries. Hermann von Kuhl, former chief of staff in the army group Kronprinz Rupprecht, and another officer, Colonel Bernhard Schwertfeger, provided the two main expert opinions on the military responsibilities for and the conduct of the German offensives in 1918. Kuhl in particular used this opportunity to lay blame on the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) for their demoralizing ‘subversive activities’ (Wühlarbeit).¹⁶

When the subcommittee, after almost eight years of deliberation, finally reached a verdict on the causes of the German collapse in 1918, it was a compromise that tried to evade a proper judgement on all crucial issues.¹⁷ But while high-ranking officers and representatives of the right-wing German National People’s Party (DNVP) had used the subcommittee to reiterate the Dolchstoß-myth, their propagandistic attempts had not gone uncontested. Two liberal-democratic historians in particular tried to counter this attack on the legitimacy of the Republic. One of them, Ludwig Bergsträsser (1883–1960), who served on the subcommittee as a Reichstag member for the left-liberal German Democratic Party (DDP), included a selection of war letters and diary entries by front-line soldiers mainly from 1918 in the published proceedings of the committee.¹⁸ On the basis of these voices from the front, he tried to substantiate his claim that the disintegration of the army at the Western Front had already begun in the summer of 1918. Almost immediately after the troops understood that the spring offensive had come to a final halt, despite the repeated follow-up attacks that took place in May and June, they lost all hope that further fighting would serve their main aim, to secure peace and go home. Consequently, already in early August troop morale dropped to an all-time low, a fact that sealed the subsequent disintegration and ultimately the defeat of the German army.¹⁹

The other critic, Martin Hobohm (1883–1942), was like Bergsträsser a professionally trained historian. He also worked with him as one of the few civilian archivists in the Reichsarchiv in Potsdam. As an expert witness, Hobohm compiled a report on ‘Social Grievances in the Army as a Partial Cause for the Collapse in 1918’. Although his report was not used in the final statement of the subcommittee and its publication was delayed – which prompted Hobohm to go public and launch a scathing attack on the bourgeois majority in the committee, it was finally published in 1929 in the proceedings of the committee.²⁰ More than eighty years after its publication, Hobohm’s book-length report is still in many respects the most sophisticated and comprehensive account of the inner workings of the German army during the war, at least as far as it impacted on the lives and the morale of ordinary soldiers. Hobohm made ample use of the – then still existing – collections of the Reichsarchiv, analyzing both military despatches, high-level reports and orders by the Army Supreme Command (Oberste Heeresleitung, OHL), as well as war letters from private soldiers and censorship reports. He also reproduced a number of key documents. Thus, he was able to show how the privileges granted to the officer caste and the authoritarian nature of the Wilhelmine military effectively undermined the motivation of the troops and substantially contributed to the disintegration of the army. As an outspoken and devoted supporter of the Weimar Republic, Hobohm was surely driven by his political values when he vehemently denied the ruthless falsification of the Dolchstoß-myth.²¹ But his historical scholarship was accurate and beyond any factual or methodological doubt. And, certainly, the gist of his argument has been confirmed by subsequent historians, notably by the late Wilhelm Deist, who described the collapse of the German army in 1918 as the result of a ‘covert military strike’ by the exhausted and war weary front-line soldiers.²²

Both Bergsträsser and Hobohm used war letters and other private eyewitness accounts as crucial and legitimate sources for a proper assessment of the front-line experience. In their reading, they focused on the always vivid, sometimes heartening and often sobering observations and perceptions conveyed in these documents. On this basis, they tried to make meaningful assertions about the ways in which soldiers responded to the violence of war and the personal, social and political consequences it entailed. With such an approach, the two republican historians contributed to a social and cultural history of war experiences that anticipated, both in its content and in its methodology, more recent attempts to analyze the popular mentalities of German soldiers during the Great War.²³

In the heated Weimar controversies about the ‘myth’ of the war experience, however, such an approach and the political challenge it posed received a hostile reception from the anti-republican, right-wing currents. Hermann von Kuhl was not the only military figure who rejected the source value of war letters out of hand. Eyewitness accounts by private soldiers, Kuhl opined, would need ‘to be conceived with great care, in any case not as historical documents on which a history of the war and also of popular opinion could be based in exact detail’.²⁴ His criticism rested on the assumption that these documents would only reflect the subjective, psychological emotions of the soldiers and were hence not ‘objective’. But von Kuhl also insisted that only the allegedly superior perspective of the commanders would allow for a proper assessment of the military situation: ‘Someone who has no overall view, who is lying in the trench and not able to look further than 20, 30 steps to the left and right, such a person was after all not in a position to judge better whether the war should be continued or not.’²⁵ Such a restrictive view of the source value of war letters reflected the fears – during the middle years of the Republic still quite justified – of former Imperial officers and Reichswehr personnel that critical voices from the Great War could hinder their attempts to make the Germans wehrhaft (fit for fight) for another war. The Reichsarchiv responded to this challenge with the publication of regimental histories and other popular recollections that were geared towards a heroic interpretation of the front-line experience.²⁶ Only in specialist publications or internal reports would military employees of the Reichsarchiv admit that sources emanating from an allegedly ‘superior’ viewpoint, such as unit war diaries or official reports, were often highly unreliable or had been deliberately doctored in order to cover up mistakes or unwelcome news.²⁷ In his outright rejection of personal testimony from private soldiers, von Kuhl had also missed one crucial point. When the German government admitted defeat and signed the armistice on 11 November 1918, this was to a large degree due to the fact that hundreds of thousands of ordinary soldiers had been ‘in a position to judge better whether the war should be continued or not’ and had simply taken the decision in their own hands. Whether von Kuhl was ready to admit it or not, the end of the German war effort had been brought about by the collective agency of subordinate, but nonetheless insightful and determined men.

Our collection of eyewitness accounts by German front-line soldiers is thus at least to some extent an attempt to put evidence back into the public domain that had already been considered during the Weimar Republic, when debates about the reliability and content of war letters proved to be as divisive as any other aspect of the legacy of the Great War. The significance of these predominantly war weary and often bitter voices from the front has been – belatedly – confirmed by recent research.²⁸ It was, however, not only due to the concerted efforts of the political right that these voices were not properly represented during the Weimar Republic. Another reason is that the specific idiom of the German soldiers seemed to be much better represented through testimony written by members of the educated elite, the so-called Bildungsbürgertum. Already in 1916, Philipp Witkop, professor of German literature at the university in Freiburg, had edited a collection of war letters written by students. Reprinted in subsequent editions under the title ‘War Letters by Fallen Students’ (Kriegsbriefe gefallener Studenten), Witkop’s collection seemed to epitomize the metaphysical interpretation of the sacrifices German soldiers had been ready to make for their fatherland. In particular, the 1928 edition was widely sold, not least through the help of state subsidies.²⁹ Reissued in 1933, after some critical letters had been removed, the collection sold 200,000 copies until 1942. From the beginning, Witkop had envisaged documenting the ‘national uprising’ of the Germans in his collection and to foster the ‘unity of the people’. In the 1928 edition, though, he also emphasized the grief and distress of the individual soldier and the peculiar circumstances of his individual fate.³⁰

Thus, the collection could do both: it served as a testimony to the personality of the individual soldiers who were represented. The letters do not only record the itinerary of their war service, they also chart the trajectory of their inner development under the impressions of military comradeship, and their struggle to cope with the strains of industrial warfare. Disillusionment and the hardening of the inner self are hence central themes in Witkop’s collection, and in many ways it could be read as a latter-day form of the classical Bildungsroman, the novel of educational and inner development. But his collection was also meant to be a written memorial to the contribution of Germany’s elite to the national war effort, and to be a powerful evocation of the larger collectives, Volk and fatherland, which were only able to give meaning to the ultimate sacrifice of death on the battlefield. The ambivalence and openness of these terms also characterized the reception of the collection already before 1933, which was unanimously positive on both sides of the political spectrum. Following the logic of Witkop’s presentation, an emphasis on the disillusionment and despair of the students or on their heroic altruism were both legitimate readings of the letters.³¹

Endowed with a high level of literacy and introspection, students were able to express complex feelings and the contradictory experiences at the front in an elaborate manner. This is another reason, on top of the already well-established status of this collection, why historians have continued to turn to Witkop’s book even after 1945 when they sought to analyze the war experiences of German soldiers. Forgetting or overlooking the efforts made by Bergsträsser, Hobohm and others, historians could – falsely – claim that industrial workers or peasant farmers had ‘rarely kept diaries’, and – also incorrectly – assert that ‘no-one seems to have been interested, or at any rate successful, in collecting or assembling their letters after the war’.³² And – only – on the basis of the selective evidence presented by Witkop the claim could be made that the inner resources that motivated German soldiers to continue their efforts were ‘cloaked in mystical and romantic notions’.³³ This is, of course, a sweeping generalization. It cannot be sustained in the light of a broader cross-selection of evidence as presented in this edition. The student’s letters are deeply steeped in the idiom of German idealism, and for this reason they display a peculiar linguistic code of expressing inner feelings and commitment to the collective. Thus, they seem to disclose a national register for the articulation of war experiences that was specific and unique to German soldiers.

But a closer inspection and interpretation of a wider sample of letters makes clear that a specific German register for the articulation of war experiences did not exist (or if it existed, then only in Witkop’s collection). With their insistence on retaining primary emotional ties to their family, farm and village, for instance, the linguistic code of peasant farmers from Catholic regions was much closer to that of their French counterparts than to any other social group in the German army.³⁴ Similar observations can be made with regard to soldiers from the industrial working class, particularly those who were affiliated with the socialist trade-union movement. Both British and German trade unionists criticized certain aspects of the national war effort and of government politics. But both also hoped that their contribution to the war would prepare the ground for a better recognition of organized labour in the political fabric of postwar society. The written record of their ‘war experience’ was thus constructed according to the ambivalent terms of a working class citizenship.³⁵

Ultimately, the documents in this collection could also serve to dispel the notion that the German front-line experiences and their cultural representations contributed to a Sonderweg, a special path that was characterized by the brutalization of politics in postwar Germany and that made